Everyone strives to be proactive on a daily basis, whether it’s taking on extra responsibilities at work to set yourself up for a promotion, bringing your lunch on a day when you know you will not have time to run to the sandwich shop, or helpfully anticipating the need of a loved one. These actions help keep you ahead of the curve; however, a constant state of anticipation can be exhausting, and it’s impossible to anticipate all the things in the future that you could be preparing for now. And, even if you could, how would you decide what was the best use of your energy?
Being proactive is a common struggle, but especially so for marketers where the only constant is change. Digital marketing has evolved past reacting to historical data or even staying active in the current market. The ever-changing online landscape requires you to think two steps ahead to invest appropriately to reach your consumers —and this is much easier said than done.
If you’re managing a campaign with millions of keywords or hundreds of ads, how do you forecast their performance and make the case for more budget to continue to grow your program? How do you execute against these plans successfully?
Here at Skai, we saw a trend with our clients wanting to plan for the future and seeking technology to help them do this while automating execution against their plans. As a result, we developed an advanced forecasting, planning, and executing solution – Skai Halogen – to assist with these tasks.
On average, teams using Halogen experienced 20% time savings and increased revenue by 53% with budget increases of 36%. In the past six months we have seen 22% of eligible spend managed on Skai run through Halogen, making it apparent that more and more marketers are adopting this proactive mentality but need help with implementation — especially on large programs.
October marks the anniversary of the first Skai client continuously running budget plans through Halogen for a year. This has saved their team time in creating accurate forecasts, answering the question of what they could do with X additional dollars in budget, executing plans, and monitoring the progress. Another client, Starcom Mediavest, used Halogen for its client, Travelodge, and experienced 91% time savings, 42% increase in revenue, and 32% lift in ROI through agile and accurate forecasting as well as automated bid execution.
Tools like Halogen are gaining adoption as marketers’ needs require predictive intelligence to keep their programs on the cutting edge by identifying opportunities in advance. As we celebrate the first anniversary of Skai Halogen adoption, it’s amazing to look back and see great results but even more exciting to proactively look forward at what is yet to come.